Not Smokin'

[Smoke2much]

This is my hardware:

P iv 1.7 Ghz
512 Mb Ram
XP Home
GeForce 2 Mx 400 Graphics Card
NVidia  43.45 Drivers
Dx 8.1

I have just run 3DMark2001 SE bench mark tests and I hve scored a very poor 2630.  I need some help here to sort this baby out.  I don't know my Anti-aliasing from my Mipmaps.  If I could get some assistance I would be very, very grateful.

Will

[Iroquois]

Don't know how much I can help. I'll run the test on my system and see what I get. I have no problems. If I score higher (which is unlikely seeing you have a better system) I'll guide you through some tweaking.

[darkhorse]

Here is what I did to fix some big problems with my MX 440, which I don't think is much better than the 400.  You might try to DL DX 9.0.  I was having major problems because I think one part of the computer thought I had 8.1 (which is what I thought I had at the time) and the DXdiag program listed me as 9.0.  FS 2002 Pro always switched to safe mode, saying I had no hardware acceleration available.  Doing this gave me piss poor resolutions and 5 FPS at small airports.  And another game wouldn't open at all, and just show the standard "this program can't continue and will be shut down" BS.  I don't know why DXdiag thought I had 9, but I decided to properly dl and install it, and now everything is working fine.  FS has sped up nicely and the other game runs fine without a hitch.  The rest of my computer is a bit slower than Smoke's: 1.2 Celeron and 384 MB PC 133 Ram.  Couldn't hurt.  I was about ready to pull my hair out before upgrading DX.

[congo]

That score isn't too bad at all. The best I ever got on an MX400 was just over 2800 I think, and that was with the nv29.42 driver in winXP, no antialias, blended settings, resolution 1024x768x32.

The limiting factor is the slow ram chips on the mx card (they are not DDR, although some were built with DDR ram and scored 3300 marks.) and the mx400 graphics engine itself is getting old by today's game standards.

When you upgrade, avoid buying another mx card. The best mx was the 460, which scored 5500 marks or better sometimes. A cheap new FX5200 scores 7000.

The scores will vary on different setups of course and these are given as a guide only.